I am not surprised by the rumor above, Rutherford is human. I can see taking up a challenge but I don’t believe he has real support from the Aquilini family.

The support, if you can believe it is, is a hands-off approach: Do what you think is best, with what you have to work with, and good luck.

Rutherford has “hockey” control and has put his hockey people in place. Win or lose on the ice, the Aquilini family wins.

Aquilini’s Ornament Will Never Lose Its Shine, Win Or Lose

Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini and his brothers continue to remain absentee owners, and let things play out as they will with the Vancouver Canucks day-to-day hockey operations.

Aquilini’s twitter account describes him as a “Vancouver business leader”. There is the rub:

Acquilini considers the Vancouver Canucks as a sports team that he can parade on his arm and in business board rooms, and not worthy of true respect and leadership, except to flaunt and show off by bragging he owns them, regardless of how poorly they do as a hockey team.

The Canucks are no more than an “organized sports team” playing a “kids game” in an organized “kids hockey league” that pretends to be a business, in his mind. The men are just “big kids”.

Aquilini will invest as little as he needs to in the Canucks because he does not consider the team a vital running component to the financial empire: Just an attractive ornament like a trophy wife: an attractive status symbol for an older man, that he and his brothers can view from a distance, as it passively accrues in value on paper.

To conclude, the Canucks are just an organized kids sports team, the Aquilini empire is all businesses, except for one that isn’t so much.

After all, men in the Aquilini family oversee businesses. The Canucks are just a “big kids” hockey team, run by “grown-up kids” in a professional hockey league.